Lorna L. Perez

Dr. Lorna Perez is an associate professor of English, teaching courses in Latina/o literature, US ethnic minority literatures, women's literature, contemporary literature, 20th century American literature, and popular culture/cultural studies.  She specializes in Latinx literature, though her research interests also include ethnic literatures of the United States, postcolonialism, diaspora, feminism, borderland theory, cultural studies and the literatures of the global south. Her critical work has appeared in numerous encyclopedias, and journals including Chicana/Latina Studies, Ethnic Studies Review, and others.  Her work "Out of Time: Resisting the Nation in One Hundred Years of Solitude" appears in the newly published Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-First Century. Her most recent critical work "Impossible Dreams: The Great Gatsby, Bodega Dreams, and the Colonial Difference," has been published in Centro Journal Vol XXXIII, Number III Fall 2021. Centro Journal is the leading peer-reviewed journal of Puerto Rican studies and is a publication of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. Her creative work has been published in elimae, The Mississippi Review, Label me Latina, BlazeVox18,  and The Buffalo News.

In addition to her work in the English Department, Dr. Perez also works with a variety of interdisciplinary committees and boards, including the Honors' Program Board (where she served as a faculty fellow from 2018-2019). In the summer of 2014, she was elected interim Chair of the English Department for academic year 2014-2015. She was the recipient of the Muriel A. Howard Presidential Award for the Promotion of Equity and Campus Diversity for 2017-2018 and the EOP Faculty Merit Award for 2019.

Beyond the campus, Dr. Perez served as the guest editor for the Label me Latina/o Special Summer 2020 issue (Un)Natural Disasters: Sites of Resistance. She has also been appointed the permanent Special Issues Editor for the journal, beginning in Fall 2020.